One thing I’ve learned as I’ve studied various aspects of United States and English history is that human nature has not changed. Sure, the superficial stuff has changed. We drive cars instead of riding a horse to get from point A to point B. We use a toilet inside our home instead of chamber pots or outhouses. And so on.

Modern conveniences have changed the landscape in which we function in society, but the fact of the matter is this: modern conveniences doesn’t wipe out any aspect of human nature. Humans are the same. You can look at any time period and any country, and you’ll find this to be true.

Sure, the society would have its own set of rules. There are certain laws, customs, clothing, music, etc that separates one society (and its specific time period) from another. But if you remove all of those things, you are left with human nature.

And this is why I advise authors who are new to historical writing to embrace the fact that historical time periods are only wallpaper. (Rose Gordon was the first person I heard the term “wallpaper” from when describing how to write historical fiction. I want to give credit where credit is due. I don’t know if she heard it from another place or came up with the term herself.)

Most authors new to historical fiction get caught up in the wallpaper. They want to make sure they’re “historically authentic”. So they focus on what people wore, what type of transportation existed back then, furniture, etc. Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing research and finding out what things were like back then. I do that, and I think you should do it, too. But you don’t want to get stuck there. There’s a temptation to treat historical romance like a history lesson when it’s not supposed to be a lesson. The purpose of historical romance is to tell a good story about the characters. It’s not to impress people with your historical-know-how.

The characters should always be front and center stage of every scene. And I don’t care what we “think” life was like “back then”. The truth is, people were not different from how they are today. Thinking that everyone in the 1800s United States were all church going people who helped others out at a moment’s notice and told the truth at all times just isn’t true. Not everyone went to church, and those who did, didn’t always go to worship God. Thinking that all women waited until their wedding night to have sex isn’t true, either. There are records of men and women marrying in order to avoid out-of-wedlock births (we call these shotgun weddings), and there were women who raised children by themselves. Thinking that women never worked outside the home is also false. The idea that people stay married forever is another myth. Laura Ingalls Wilder had a sister who owned a homestead for a short period of time, and Laura’s daughter got a divorce. Laura also worked at a paper (after her marriage). Her daughter was also a journalist. I learned this when I took a tour of De Smet, South Dakota (which was one of the towns she grew up in). Laura was born in 1867, but people have told me, “No one did X, Y, and Z back then”.

I could go into more examples, but the post is already getting long. Suffice it to say that human nature is not restricted to a neat little box of “this NEVER happened back then” or “this ALWAYS happened back then”. Society might not have approved of certain thing, so those things weren’t common (or at least they weren’t discussed in public). But they did happen.

Regardless of your time period and your location, the human condition is complex. You have your heroes. You have your villains. And to be honest, picking out who the heroes and the villains are is subjective. You can’t be objective if you’re writing fiction because fiction demands you have a hero and a villain (even if that villain is nature, another person, or the hero himself). Every story must have conflict, and conflict depends on villains. Therefore, writers have to pinpoint a good guy and a bad guy.

So while it’s good to some research into the time period you’re doing, I wouldn’t suggest getting so wrapped up in it that you miss what really makes a story compelling, and that element is your main character (or main characters). While you will have an element of readers who obsess over historical details, most readers want an emotional connection with the hero. Therefore, it is my conclusion that the best thing you can do while writing historical fiction is to focus on the characters and the story they have to tell. If you can master the complexities of human nature, the wallpaper will fade away. The wallpaper won’t matter. What will matter is that the story resonated on an emotional level with the reader. And that is what good fiction is supposed to do.

I have now officially dissolved the LLC in every way except in one area. This morning, as I filed the final paperwork for closing the LLC in the state I live in, I realized I felt wonderful. I had no idea that carrying around the LLC (something I felt obligated to have since it was the thing “smart” authors did) was weighing me down. Suddenly, writing wasn’t fun. It was a business. And because it was a business, there was the burden of making a certain income to justify what I was doing.

This morning, it occurred to me all of that nonsense is gone. Removing the LLC has been the best thing I could have done to save my creativity. And I decided that from this point forward, if I don’t want to do something, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to do stuff I want to do.

And that brings me to the actual topic of this post:

Sometimes you have to let things go.

I realize there are some areas in a person’s life that they can’t remove. Obviously, you have to work to put food on the table, you have to pay taxes, you have to take care of a sick child in the middle of the night, you have to keep your house clean, etc. This is just part of the human experience.

But there are things you can remove from your life to make things easier. I don’t know if it’s because I’m now in my forties (so I have some experience under my belt), but a lot of stuff people often do are things they feel obligated to do. They aren’t things they have to do. They’re things others have imposed upon them.

I think we’ve all been there. You know the task ahead of you is optional, but you can’t bring yourself to say no because someone else expects you to do it, and you’re afraid if you don’t do it, then the person will get upset with you. Sometimes you do things to keep the peace. The older I get, the less inclined I am to keep doing those activities. I think as you get older, you realize your time is getting more and more precious because people only live for so long. The older you get, the less years you’re likely to have. So you start to choose your activities more carefully.

This is why I decided to only write stories I’m most excited about writing. This is why I’m cutting back on how many books I write at a time so I have time to do other things I love (such as walking 45-60 minutes 5 days a week) and spending time with my husband and kids. This is why I cut the email list. This is why I cut the LLC. I no longer have time for the hamster wheel that is a “successful” author’s life. I’m tired of chasing after marketing schemes that usually don’t yield more sales. Most of the time, they only end up wasting time.

Remember in school when your teacher handed you assignments to fill out that was busy work? You knew there wasn’t a point to the assignments. You could tell the difference between working on something that advanced your education and something that didn’t. In real life, we end up filling our days with the same kind of busy work. They’re really distractions. They don’t move you toward your goals. But they seem so urgent at the moment that we put stuff that do advance our goals further down the list. Then by the time we can get to those activities that get us closer to our goals, we’re usually too exhausted for the day. We tell ourselves, we’ll do those things tomorrow. If we’re not careful, tomorrow gets sucked up in busy work, too.

I’m looking at everything I’m doing and asking myself, “Is this busy work? Or is this going to get me closer to my goals?”

The email list, to be honest, was busy work. I was spending one week working on a special epilogue to go with each new release, and I was making this exclusive to my email list or people in my closed Facebook group. Well, after having this email list since 2015, I realized that over the years, more people were unsubscribing than they were subscribing. Also, less and less people were even opening the email to read the 1500-2500 words I spent agonizing over for a week. The reason is was so hard for me to write those scenes is because the book was done. When the book is done, I can’t think of anything to add to it. It was busy work. Very few people were interested. So why was I spending so much time doing something I dreaded?

This is the kind of busy work that needs to be removed from our lives. Life is short. Why make yourself miserable doing something because you feel like you have to do it? If the activity is optional, let it go. Spend that time doing something you enjoy.

In case you think letting go of this stuff is easy, it’s not. It’s hard. I’ve been wanting to get rid of the email list and my LLC for two years, but I was afraid to do it because I was going to let someone down. So I kept pushing myself to go on, and in the end, I started to dread what was coming. I was frustrated. Sometimes I was angry at myself for not having the courage to say no, but mostly, I was frustrated.

By letting go of things that aren’t working, I found a new sense of freedom. And in the freedom is a huge sense of relief. I’m no longer on the hook to do busy work. I can spend that time doing something I love instead. It’s amazing what a difference this has been making.

Now, I don’t know what your “busy work” is, but I know it won’t be easy to give it up. It’s taking me two years to finally give mine up. The first step is the realizing this thing isn’t working for you. Then you have to let the process work itself out because I do believe this is a process. I don’t think anyone can snap their fingers and just walk away from something that has become a habit. I heard once that success is not a straight line. It’s a lot of twists and turns. It’s a process.

I also think the more tuned into other people’s feelings you are, the harder it is to do. I’m very conscious of other people’s emotions. I hate to upset anyone. And this has made it harder to make certain decisions along the way. You have to fight the urge to feel guilty for not meeting someone’s expectations. But I guess you have to look at it this way: if you can’t give 100% of yourself to something, then are you really doing other people a favor? I mean, I could keep writing those special scenes, but if I hate doing them, that will reflect in the work. And in the end, the lack of quality is going to disappoint people anyway.

For a personal experience, my deaf kid wanted to stay after school to do some activities with his peers, but that would require me to drive down to pick him up every day. That totaled about one hour five days a week, and I would have to pick him up around 5:30. I get up at 4 in the morning so that I can get ready for the day. I like having an hour in the morning to be shower and then spend time in silence to get mentally ready for the day. After that, it’s hectic around the house. I have four kids and a husband. Getting everyone ready for school and work is a lot of work. I like to wind down at night, and I like to be in bed between 5:30-6. I don’t go to sleep right away, but I have found this wind down time goes a long way to renewing my energy and getting a solid, good night’s sleep. I’m an introvert, and introverts lose energy when they’re around people. They need time alone to build the energy back up. This makes me much more productive during the day. I’m also a much happier person to be around. So I had to say no to picking up the kid after school every day. Instead, I compromised on picking him up two days a week. I can manage that. But doing it five days would have exhausted me.

So that’s what I mean by busy work and cutting it from your life. Obviously, you can’t get rid of everything you don’t like doing, but there are some areas that you can release. Letting those things go has a surprising way of making life more positive. I don’t know if anyone found this motivational, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to write the post. 🙂

In dissolving the LLC, I am going to have to go through every book and take out the LLC information from the interior file. (The covers will stay the same.) Anyway, I have 85 books (some under a pen name) to go through. At the end of most of my books is a link to sign-up form to my email list.

I’ve been doing this list since 2015, and to be honest, I’m burned out from it. I have wanted to get rid of it for about a year. Getting rid of the LLC is proving to be a time when I can start fresh. So this is one of the things I’m going to leave in the past. Therefore, I’m removing the sign-up to my email list information at the end of my books.

I still plan to be online. I’ll still make posts in this blog since I continue to get enjoyment from it.

I’m most active on Facebook and this blog. I plan to spend more time on MeWe once I get all of my books updated and re-published.

This transition is going to take a couple of months. I have to go through 85 books and see what needs updating. Then I have to republish the updated versions on Amazon, Google Play, and Smashwords (which will deliver them to B&N, Kobo, Apple, and smaller retailers Smashwords is affiliated with). This is going to be a long and slow process. I can’t do it all at once.